LAST OF RADICAL LEADERS ELUDED POLICE 11 YEARS

By PAUL L. MONTGOMERY

Published: October 25, 1981

Jeffrey Carl Jones, arrested Friday night in his Bronx apartment as he watched the World Series with his wife and 4-year-old son, was the last identified leader of the Weather Underground to escape capture or surrender in the 11-year search by the authorities to round up members of the terrorist group.

Mr. Jones, 34, and his common-law wife, Eleanor Stein Raskin, 35, had been associated with the Weathermen from the group's inception in the summer of 1969 and went underground with it the next year. Mr. Jones was a signer of several statements in which the Weathermen took responsibility for bombings of public buildings, and had been sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for most of the last 11 years.

Police interest in the couple was renewed in August 1979, when they were indicted in Hudson County, N.J., for unlawful possession of explosives in connection with a raid on a radicals' bomb factory in Hoboken. They apparently fled to New York soon afterward, once again becoming Federal fugitives.

Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin were ordered held in $200,000 cash bond at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan yesterday pending extradition proceedings to New Jersey. Stacey J. Moritz, the assistant United States attorney handling the case, told Federal Magistrate Kent Sinclair Jr. that the proceedings should begin tomorrow. Employed as a Laborer

At the bail hearing, Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin held hands and smiled frequently at each other. Mr. Jones, asked by a reporter about his callused hands, said he had been working as a laborer, but would not elaborate.

An F.B.I. spokesman said that, at the moment, there was no demonstrable connection between the couple and the arrests of three members of the Weather Underground at the Brink's robbery in Nanuet on Tuesday. However, it was known that both Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin had been associated in the past with Katherine Boudin, one of those arrested in the robbery, though authorities did not know if there had been any contact since 1977.

The lawyer for the couple, Morton Stavis of Hoboken, said at the bail hearing that he had been in negotiation with Hudson County authorities ''for some time'' for the surrender of his clients on the explosives charges. ''To the best of my knowledge, the F.B.I. has been aware of these negotiations,'' Mr. Stavis said. However, Kenneth Walton of the F.B.I. New York office, who is in charge of the antiterrorist task force, said he was not aware of any plea bargaining.

''Perhaps some effort is going to be made to escalate this out of all proportion,'' Mr. Stavis told the court. ''But this case is unconnected and disconnected with the recent series of events.'' Couple Lived in the Bronx

The couple had lived in apartment 6C at 2965 Decatur Avenue in the Bronx under the names John and Sally Maynard. Mr. Jones, who once gave his hometown as Sylmar, Calif., after an arrest in Chicago in 1969, had been associated since his teens with the radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society. which became the Weathermen. In 1967 he went to Cambodia with Cathlyn P. Wilkerson and Steve Halliwell of S.D.S. to meet with the Vietcong, and organized antiwar demonstrations in Chicago that summer.

Miss Raskin grew up in New York and attended Barnard College and Columbia Law School. She is believed to be divorced from her former husband, who was named Raskin. Her father, Arthur Stein, was an economist in the New Deal and her mother, Annie, was active in social causes such as civil rights. Her mother died earlier this year and her father had died some time previously.

Mr. Jones was one of 11 members who prepared an S.D.S. manifesto calling for armed violence in the summer of 1969. The cover of the manifesto had a silhouette of a guerrilla fighter and a line from Bob Dylan's 1965 song ''Subterranean Homesick Blues'' - ''You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.'' The faction advocating violence and alliance with armed groups such as the Black Panthers came to be called the Weathermen after the manifesto cover; the name was later changed to Weatherpeople and then Weather Underground when female members protested. Appeared in Underground Movie

In 1969, Miss Raskin was a co-author with Miss Boudin of ''The Bust Book,'' a manual for radicals about what to do after arrest. According to most estimates, there were about 300 active members of the Weather movement in late 1969 and about 40 who went underground early the next year to start a terrorist campaign. Mr. Jones had been listed as interorganizational secretary when the group was founded and later was known as one of the five-member central committee, along with Miss Boudin, Miss Wilkerson, Bernardine Dohrn and William B. Ayers.

In 1975 Mr. Jones appeared in an underground movie with the four other leaders, with their faces turned from the camera to avoid identification. Mr. Jones recounted the experiences of ''the group'' in the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971. He said the bomb, placed in a storage room behind the Senate barbershop, had failed to go off the first time, so that the participants had to return the next day to re-trigger it. A caller alerted the Capitol police a half-hour before the blast, so that there were no injuries; damage was estimated at $100,000.

Beginning about 1975, when the Weathermen set off the last of more than 20 bombs in public places, there was a debate among the remaining members about whether to surface and resume legal political activity or to stay in the terrorist underground. Mr. Jones was believed to have favored what the group called ''inversion'' or surfacing while Miss Boudin was believed to support continued armed violence.

The next trace of Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin was in Hoboken in 1979, when police raided an apartment where materials for making bombs were found. The apartment was traced to the couple, who were indicted in absentia.